Sunday, July 24, 2016

Pisa

When we were planning our Italy trip we debated if we would have time to go out to Pisa or not. It is just a 45 minute to an hour train ride from Florence, but we didn't have much time to spare in our itinerary. We decided to go for it and I am glad we did, it was fun to see such an iconic site. We only stayed for a couple hours but it was plenty to just see the tower and church area.

The train station. We need a better train system in the US, train transportation in Europe is great.

I liked all the Italian cities listed.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is actually the bell tower for the church in Pisa, but you never see the church in most pictures because the novelty of the leaning of the tower overshadows it.

My holding up the tower pose. Can I just say I loved my Altra shoes on this trip. We were walking 20,000+ steps a day on this trip and I don't think I could have done it being pregnant with any other pair of shoes.

See everyone else also doing the same pose or variations on it.

Robert was confused as to why it looked like everyone was doing yoga, so he decided to do some of his own yoga poses.

Inside of the church.

The baptistery, also almost never gets seen.

The front of the church. Construction began in 1063.

The tower. Construction began in 1173 but it wasn't completed until 1350. The soil that it sits on is clay and sand so the tower began to lean when they got to the third floor. They stopped construction for a while, then started again and tried to compensate for the leaning by building one side taller than the other, which did not work and the tower leaned even more.

Waiting in line to go up to the tower.

It wasn't until 2001 that the tower was stabilized. Until then the tower continued to lean more and more. Under the stabilization project they actually brought it back upright .5 degree because of fear of a collapse with how much it had begun to lean.

Going up! This was actually the second tower we were climbing that day. I thought I did pretty good considering I was pregnant!

The inside of the tower has a series of counter weights and monitors.

The stairs are so worn down from all the people through the ages trekking up and down. You could definitely feel the tilt as you went up. On one side it was harder to walk up the stairs!